CRACK … FIZZ

It's a hot and dry Colorado summer in 1984. Dad and Valerie have planned a family vacation to the Grand Canyon. By vacation I mean road trip, where we will camp out along the way, go fishing, and do some hiking and exploring. Family vacations for us are constrained by the budget of a rank-and-file employee Bell Telephone Co. in downtown Denver, and a mechanic who specializes in auto alignment. Our road trip will not involve fancy motels or expensive diners where you can buy burgers and fries or steak and eggs. Like all our family vacations with Dad, this will include things like sleeping bags, tents, flashlights, coolers, fishing gear, and a whole lotta canned goods. 

Mom drops me and Miles off at Dad's house on Friday. If she feels any trepidation about our going, it is nearly invisible but for a tinge of worry in her eyes. Mom is optimistic and forgiving. Mom also needs a break. Perhaps she feels as many single mothers do: a guilty sense of relief to be rid of kids who don't listen. 

"Have a good time! I'll see you in a week!" Mom says, waving from the driver's seat of her Ford sedan, giving us her wide and perfect-toothed smile. 

"Bye, Mom!" We wave back, carrying bulky school backpacks filled with several days' supply of clothing, as well as hair- and toothbrushes and a few toys. I watch her roll out of the driveway and disappear down the street before we clamor through the side door of Dad's old house. We walk into the familiar sights and smells of the mudroom and kitchen. The kitchen has old linoleum flooring with brownish ornate designs, now faded by traffic and time. Over the kitchen table is a framed painting of an old man with white hair and beard, praying over a plain bowl of soup and slice of bread. 

The kitchen is never clean, with rare exception. There is a backlog of dirty dishes caked in days-old food that pile up in and around the sink, a trail of stench on the counter. Dad and Valerie smoke red Marlboro cigarettes, and the pungent smell of cheap tobacco permeates the house. The smoke is sometimes mixed with a skunky odor, hidden (badly) in the upstairs bedroom. Scattered ashtrays lie about tables and countertops and are stubbornly full. Empty pop cans are used as makeshift ashtrays when the others are full, and we are careful to search for cigarette butts and ash before we take a sip of our A&A Root Beer. The clutter in the kitchen includes medications, mugs filled with cold, abandoned coffee, and the ever-present Budweiser cans. The quantity of cans is a gauge for us to determine how much we can get away with, and when we need to make ourselves scarce. The refrigerator housing their stash of beer is covered in photos and magnets, one of which is a frog with its head down a pelican's beak, the frog unrelenting as it chokes the bird's neck with its free hands. It reads: NEVER give up. Another magnet reads: If you do what you've always done, you'll get what you've always gotten. 

Valerie, our stepmom, and Dad recently bought the house in an area of Arvada called Olde Town. The house was built in 1901, situated on a dead-end road that runs parallel to a berm with railroad tracks. Miles and I are convinced that the house is haunted and contains secret passages connecting the large closet to the storage space over the door in the spare bedroom. This is a great premise for many of our games. 

"Are you guys excited for vacation?" Dad asks, standing tall in the kitchen. 

"Yes!" Miles says. I smile shyly, nod a little as I grip the straps of my backpack. 

"Well, we are going to leave early in the morning, so don't stay up too late tonight." He adds a firm, "Okay?" 

"Okay!" We answer, shuffling out of the kitchen. 

"Dinner will be ready in an hour." 

There is an air of anxious excitement in the house, as preparations are still to be made for our vacation and evening has long since passed. Out-of-state trips with Dad never happen; typically, we spend summers camping just two or three hours west, deep in the Rockies. This will be our first vacation outside of the state with Dad, and he's spent many hours mapping our route, figuring out where we will camp and catch fish and making lists of supplies and fuel estimations. 

The next morning, we rise early with anticipation and Valerie sleeps late. Even Valerie's son, James, is up early. Our stepbrother always sleeps late. We don't complain. We know better not to. 

"Why not?" she says, when she wakes up with drooping eyes and a groggy voice. "It's vacation!" Her eyes look dim, vacant. 

"Don't you want any coffee?" Dad asks, holding up a freshly brewed pot. 

"Nuh-uh." Valerie yawns, stretches, and is left alone at the kitchen table as Dad attempts to organize and load up supplies. 

It's a similar scene that we witness most weekend mornings at Dad's: Valerie shaking off a nasty hangover by cracking open a can of Budweiser for breakfast. Crack ... fizz. The sound of the can opening is just like in the commercials. The aluminum ripping, a staccato of pops that quickly crescendos towards a final sshhplit, followed by the hiss of escaping gas from its air-tight confinement. It's the sound of an Ahh!: a mini burst of relief. It's a familiar sound, one that pricks up our ears from other rooms in the cranky, old house. Although Dad doesn't start drinking as early in the morning as Valerie, we are sure he will make up for lost time later on. We can sense it by the way he eyes the can with eagerness. But Dad sips his coffee, drawing out the little patience that he has, gently remarking on the hour. He does a few dishes without making much of a dent in the pile, and finally begins to stack the car with supplies on his own. 

Dad has grown a full beard for this summer, and he wears a cowboy-style straw hat to fend off the high plains sun. His chestnut hair is full and wavy, he has long skinny legs under his cut-off denim shorts, and he wears John Lennon glasses. He's a good-looking man at a little over six-feet tall with hazel, almost yellow eyes, lean muscles, and broad shoulders. His disposition is infectious and fun. Except when he isn't. 

Originally from rural Northern California, Dad's family goes back multiple generations in America we've been told. 

"Okies," he explains, "from Skokie.” He carries a box of cans to the trunk and we follow. 

"What's an Okie?" Miles and I ask, laughing. 

"An Okie is a person from Oklahoma, from back in the olden days when people drove horses in covered wagons. The Okies left the dust storms; real bad storms big as tornadoes. They got away from the storms because they couldn't grow anything in the dust, and moved to California to work on fruit farms. That's how my family ended up in Ukiah." 

Dad is a proud descendent of pilgrims, the likes of which are depicted in Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath: a book I've not read but that Dad talks about. As he packs up the car, sweat runs down his temples, and he tells us rumors of more prosperous relatives. These rumors are about a great-great uncle, one Admiral Cockburn of the British Navy, who gave the order to set light to the White House in the war of 1812. Although Dad is an American patriot, he relishes this story and its sense of rebellion, its spirit of anti-institutionalism. He's proud as he tells it to us, even though we've all heard it before. We follow him back and forth from the old yellow house to the car, sometimes getting in the way of his long stride. 

Although we know Dad never went to college like Mom, and never made it past the eleventh grade, he is intelligent. Not what Mom would call intellectual. I never see him read Steinbeck, or any other book for that matter. Most weekends at Dad's are filled with Sunday football, occasional ACDC and Tom Petty soundtracks, and various house and mechanical projects that are temperamental. However impatient, Dad is terrifically gifted with his hands and occasionally works on craftsman projects, like building models of old battleships. Perhaps his lack of education aids in the creation of his darker sides, his rougher and tougher moods. Well, that and his own father, whom we only met once when we were babies. Dad says that when he received draft papers for Vietnam, he made necessary preparations to dodge Uncle Sam's call to duty. This meant he had to drop out of high school. Lucky for him, the war ended before he had to officially enlist. 

With the moon sun blazing behind us in the cloudless blue sky, we brim with an anxiousness to begin our journey. Our annoyance at Valerie makes us brave, and we all beg her to help Dad so that we can leave. Well after 1:00 pm, Valerie succumbs to our collective urgency. We plead for lunch before getting into the car. But Dad is cranky and mightily impatient in the unrelenting heat of the Colorado afternoon. He barks at us to wait, and we quickly fall silent, even if our stomachs don't. The process of fitting a week's worth of camping gear into the trunk of his 1974 Chevy Nova hasn't helped Dad’s mood. His patience has officially run out, and he is short with Valerie; she, in turn, short with him. This is how their dances always begin. With each new offense comes a stubborn defense, which is, of course, a brand-new can of Budweiser. Crack... fizz. 

"Don't forget the cooler of beers for the car!" Valerie shouts to Dad. The weight of the large cooler is beyond our puny arms. We dance around the car, waiting and excited to go. 

"Go play!" Dad snaps. 

"We are playing!" 

"Not here! Over there!" 

At last, finally, in the wicked heat of the afternoon, our road trip begins. With empty stomachs and underlying irritation all around, the Chevy makes its way down the street and we feel the enthusiasm for adventure. I'm six-years-old, with the promise of another birthday coming soon in August. Miles is eight-and-a-half, the oldest James is seven months younger than me. Unlike Miles and I, who are blond and blue eyed, James has bright-red hair, a face specked with freckles, and two front teeth missing. His eyes are kind, if not sad, and he giggles when he laughs. James is painfully shy and cute. We don't know much about his real father, who lives somewhere out of state, maybe in California. They don't visit each other. At some point after Dad and Valerie got married, Dad adopted James and gave him our last name: Johnson. 

It makes sense for James to sit between Miles and me. We have our pillows to lie down on or put behind our backs or hold and cuddle. It's a tight fit, but we begin the drive feeling cozy and excited and forgetting about lunch. Here we are, lined up in the backseat, two blonds and a redhead in the middle singing a hundred bottles of beer on the wall, a hundred bottles of beer! Take one down pass it around, ninety-nine bottles of beer... James sings with the most enthusiasm followed by myself and then Miles. Dad and Valerie find this cute for five or so seconds. Miles, as the oldest, drops off the song first, and I get bored of it when we reach seventy bottles of beer on the wall. But James sees it through to the end, even as we all cringe, and with just as much enthusiasm and gusto as when he started, he begins again right from the top! 

"Ok, James. Now that's enough," Dad says. We are heading south on a major highway now, Interstate 25. 

"Eighty-nine bottles of beer on the wall, eighty-nine bottles of beer!" James sings, giggling. 

"James, it's too loud," Dad says. 

"Take one down, pass it around!" 

"That's enough, James." 

"Eighty-eight bottles of beer-" 

"Enough, damn it! Enough!" The car slides a bit into the next lane, effectively shutting up the loud redhead. Miles and I are weary of the repetition as well, still hungry. We are secretly relieved Dad has made it end. 

"Oh, so James isn't allowed to have fun?" Valerie asks. "Let him finish." Crack... fizz. 

Dad clenches his jaw and I watch as his mastication muscles flex again and again. I know this body language well. He's biting down on his molars. 

Time passes with a few more verses. Eventually, thanks to the suppressive heat and the ticking clock, James relents and grows tired. We all fall into the quiet hum of our south-westbound drive in the blue Chevy Nova. 

As we drive, I look at Valerie. She has a good face for looking at. She's a few years Dad's junior and talks with a Colorado mountain accent: a heavy drawl with a hint of twang. To top that off, she speaks with a lisp that makes most of her words sound like they end in a "pthh." Valerie's build is long and bony, and she wears daisy dukes. Her brown hair is permed. She has knock knees and walks with flip-flops in the summer that peel and slap against the ground, and she never wears a bra. I find Valerie captivating: she has gold-rimmed, '80s aviator glasses, behind which are wide brown eyes. She's a twin of Shelly Duvall. Valerie buys things at the grocery store like Orange Crush, Lucky Charms, and greasy potato chips, which earn her some points with me and Miles. Valerie often eats only once a day—usually late at night. And she goes into excruciating detail when she has an audience. She is the opposite of Mom in form and character. Like Dad, Valerie never received a college education. She tells us that she joined the army and completed four years of honorable service. 

Two hours pass, and I'm squished. I'm sweating from every pore. The breeze from the rolled-down window is just more hot air. The hunger pains that had subsided return. 

"I'm hungry." 

"Me too," James says. 

"What do you think?" Valerie asks, turning to Dad. 

"I want to keep going," he says. 

"How much further do you think it is?" 

"Oh, not too, too far. They'll be fine. They'll eat better later if they're hungry." 

"Yeah. Well, you wanna stop at a gas station?" 

"No, not yet. I still have 'bout a quarter tank. Can you hand me one of those?" Dad nods in the direction of the cooler. 

"Okay you guys, just sit tight. We'll be there soon." Valerie says. Crack ... fizz. She hands an open beer to Dad, who puts it between his legs, his hands occupied with the steering wheel. 

The empty beer cans smashed hither and thither inside the car. There is such a great quantity of empty cans on the floor that they form a metallic sea at our feet, steadily rolling and clanking with the rhythm of the tire rotations. The Chevy Nova has begun to smell of stale, watered-down beer and secondhand Marlboro-cigarette smoke. The combination results in a unique type of headache that is well-known to me and my brothers. The empty beer cans make their way into whatever crevice in the cramped car is available: in-between and underneath seats, beside the cooler and our backpacks, and become footrests under Valerie's flip-flops. Dad expertly holds his beer between his legs as he drives. His eyes dart from side to side with every sip. We've seen this enough times to know he's scanning for cops. Valerie finishes her beer, belches, and mindlessly tosses the empty can at her feet. He, he, he, she laughs. She's trying to raise our spirits, but I put on my red plastic sunglasses and stare at the passing landscape of rising boulders that stretch towards the blue sky, and the tall, green pines and the roadside streams. 

The Chevy Nova follows the setting sun along Colorado 160 towards the southwestern border. Before darkness sets in, we set up camp at a site close to the sand dunes in the southern Colorado Rockies. James and I run up a small hill in search of dead wood for the fire, and the sky above the low sun looks gray, in contrast with the white aspens reaching towards it. The aspen leaves sway in the wind, looking high and lonely. We get a few whiffs of food cooking over a campfire, making our tummies growl. A few hours earlier, the sand dunes were a blur of a visit. We ran up vast mountains of fine-grained sand, plopped into the cushy terrain, and rolled all the way down. We pretended to be in quicksand. We begged for Dad and Valerie to bury the three of us with our heads sticking out. Before it got very late, we made haste to leave; James, at one point, refusing to go. 

"Don't go too far!" Valerie yells from the campsite behind us. But we feel more relief the higher we go, the fresh air replenishes our lungs and pumps blood into our feet that have been captive in the car. She warns us against animals often found in this region of the low Rockies. We get instructions on how to handle such an encounter. If it's a mama bear... If you hear a rattle... If it looks like a cat... 

More relief comes when we finally eat—a simple task of filling up the empty within. Campfire smoke wafts through my nose, and I'm very tired. My sleeping bag is a welcome sight. We sleep five bodies to one tent. 

The morning is crisply cold, and I smell coffee brewing over wooden coals. Mornings are often just me and Dad, as we are the first to rise. He's sober and the day is fresh, and I have him all to myself. There is something peaceful in this moment; he speaks to me with an even, well-intentioned tone. 

"Hey there, whatcha doin' up so early?" He pours himself some coffee from a boiling percolator. 

"I don't know." I feel shy. Intimidated. Lucky. 

"Can't sleep no more?" 

"No." 

"Well, here. Come sit." 

I watch him sip his steaming coffee and listen to him commenting on the state of the sky and weather. I'm a happy listener of one as he describes our journey on a map, offering me a plastic cup of water at the picnic table where we sit. 

"We are going to take a shortcut," Dad explains, pointing to colorful lines on the map. "Here we are now, and we need to go further west. We'll pass by Pagosa Springs, here, and then take a left on Colorado 151, here. Tomorrow we'll camp at the Navajo Res and go fishin’. We can catch dinner." 

"I thought we were going to the Grand Canyon?" I ask. 

"We are, but we have to go through New Mexico to get there. See?" 

I nod. I contribute little to the conversation and the study of maps. I'm content to watch him mull over our journey, account for our supplies, and begin to get camp in order. 

"Go fetch me those bags over there. Help me tidy up this table so people can eat when they wake up." 

I hop into motion, enjoying the role of being Dad's helper. But our time together doesn't last long, a brief moment is all, before everyone else awakes one by one, and the private moment dissipates like the cooling campfire's smoke. Without too many arguments, and after several trips to the bushes to pee, we manage to pack our gear and move out. 

The drive to Pagosa Springs is endless, and we fall in and out of naps in the backseat of the Chevy Nova. As hours pass in the small car, the smells of stale beer and day-old campfire smoke mixed with cigarettes begin to stick to our clothes. Dad tries to encourage us by counting down the miles on the highway signs, but even James is quiet. We have to pee but are told to hold it. My bladder strains, and this makes me hyper-alert. Details of every rock, every tree, every cloud seem to have a secret. When Dad stops, at last, we pee on the side of the road behind a cluster of trees (a much easier task for my brothers). James and I play together in the backseat with our toys, annoying Miles who can only find peace in sleep. Eventually our game lapses into silence and my eyes fall shut, lulled by the vehicle's droning motion. We stop for gas and stretch our legs and are allowed a small bit of candy. A few stops are made at tourist lookouts at Valerie's request, but we all await the promise of the Grand Canyon. 

Dad told me when we were looking at the map earlier that Colorado 151 was an unpaved, gravel road, which turns out to be correct. Along Colorado 151 are similarly unpaved and unnamed side roads blending into the desert landscape of the southern foothills. The benefit of an unpaved road is clear in my six-years-old mind: speed and the ability to drink without getting caught. We're sick of being in the hot, stuffy car that offers no air conditioning, let alone seatbelts. Hot air from the semi-rolled down window blows onto my face, drying the sweat that drips from my forehead and temples. But I'm grateful for air that isn't stale. 

The desert close to the southern Colorado border with New Mexico is vast and unchanging. In the near distance, the Rockies rise jarringly from the ground and into the depths of sky. The landscape near the state highway is arid, undulating, and infertile. The Chevy Nova hums towards the New Mexico border carrying with it the sea of empty beer cans at our feet. Crack... fizz. Dad's eyes dart back and forth, then he takes a sip, finds his left turn onto Colorado 151, and accelerates. We reach a speed of about thirty-five or forty miles per hour when, out of nowhere, we hear screeching breaks and then a sudden, very loud slamming of metal against metal—BAM! 

Dad's Nova is clipped in the rear by a pickup truck. Shit! Valerie grabs the handle above her window. Dad grips the wheel, struggling for control as we violently fishtail. The car spins around like a Dukes of Hazard stunt, gravel flying into our open windows and showering over the beer cans like pellets. Dad's foot strikes down on the brake with the force of his entire body weight to control the spiraling motion of the car. Our heads in the backseat become pendulum balls: my head smacks against the window and then bangs against James's head, sending it towards Miles. Miles's head goes into his window. Blood drizzles from his blond crewcut, then the pendulum reverses back to me. James screams, or opens his mouth as if trying to. Dust flies into his toothless face. A second or two later, Dad's Nova stops with a screech and a final thud into a ditch, and then silence. to 

"Is... is everyone okay?" Dad asks. 

James begins to cry. Miles looks shocked, fingering the blood he's wiped from his head. My heart races, but a smile creeps onto my face that I can't suppress. I'm giggling, then laughing, then hysterical, almost choking. It's funny! It's hilarious! 

I laugh uncontrollably. How silly! Our heads banging together like a dinner bell on a farm! The car spinning out of control, as if in slow motion! Valerie cursing! Chuckles escape so quickly from my mouth that I have to gasp for air. It soon turns into a wild and uncontrollable sounding cackle. It's a nervous laugh, and it's the kind that's catchy. Miles meets my eyes. He smiles and begins to join in. Soon, we are both bowled over in the back. Wow! What fun! What a ride! We hadn't had this much excitement the whole trip! Let's do it again! Again! Miles forgets the wound on his head. 

Dad gets out of the car to confront the driver of the pickup, but not without first whispering orders to Valerie to very quickly clear out the beer cans. Police may be coming, he says, his eyes darting left to right. More delicately than I've ever seen Valerie do anything, even crocheting baby blankets and stitching embroidery, she begins collecting the beer cans in garbage bags without making so much as a sound. 

"I'll look at it in a bit," she offers to Miles, who is still laughing. "You'll be fine, it's just a little blood. Help me clean up, guys. Quick. If the cops see the beer cans, they'll think it's our fault." 

We did. And we filled each garbage bag all the way to the top.

Published: URSA MINOR Volume 4: Punctuated Equilibrium (2020)